The joys and fright of Halloween

Isn’t Halloween grand? What other holiday lets you dress like a freak, eat massive amounts of hardened sugar and get away with committing random acts of vandalism? I mean, besides every other day of your life.

Let’s focus on my favorite subject, though. CANDY. Gotta love candy. Candy is sorta like a drug – it can alter your mood, get you wired and it tastes good – only candy is cheap and legal. Although I’m pretty convinced that Sour Patch Kids should be a controlled substance.

I’m starting to re-examine some things that I accepted unconditionally as a child. Candy is one of them. Television is the other. For example, this summer while I was at home (read: suburban hell) some reruns of “Voltron: Defender of the Universe” were on TV. (Don’t worry, there’s a point to this. And, yes, I’m 21 years old and still watch cartoons. Wanna make something out of it?) I was psyched to watch a cartoon that was a staple of my childhood television viewing. Alas, I was disenchanted. After watching two episodes, I realized that every episode is the same, only with a different Re-beast. Stupid King Zarkon.

Well after being let down by one of my favorite cartoons, I was wondering what else was suspect in my life, and, since candy was another staple of my childhood, I decided to take a closer look. Before Halloween, I was in CVS. (The pharmacy that is secretly taking over the world, in conjunction with Starbuck’s Coffee.) A friend of mine was picking up some candy corn. I’m not a big fan of candy corn, but the display listed the ingredients.

The first thing that caught my eye was the word mallocreme. What the hell is mallocreme? I demand some answers! It sounded sketchy, kind of like alar (mmm … alar, the apple wonder drug) to me, so of course I had to give it another try. Nothing really special there, though I have discovered among die-hard candy corn fans that two factions exist to belong to: l) the group that believes that all three colors of candy corn are the same, or 2) the group that believes the white, orange and yellow have distinctive tastes. You make the call. Me, I’ll pass.

I think I much prefer the infamous candy ingredient, nougat, over mallocreme. At least with mallocreme you had some sort of hint about what it was, some sort of marshmallow, or creamy kind of thing. With nougat, you have no idea of what your dealing with. Take a Three Musketeers bar. It’s filled with creamy nougat. All that’s inside is this mysterious, fluffy, light brown substance. It’s not chocolate, but what is it? It not only shows up in creamy form, but it’s crunchy in Whatchamacallit bars. Aaaaahhhhhh! Too much for me to handle. And yet, I continue to eat it anyway. If there’s all this unnatural stuff in candy, what other weird stuff can they put in regular food, so, why eat healthy at all? Yeah. I think there’s some kind of line of logic in there, I just can’t tell what it is.

Well, that’s what I got out of Halloween this year, besides having to work at Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream in Georgetown in a cow costume, complete with udder. An old man tried to milk me.

Strange sighting of the week: As I was going to one of my many crew workouts in the morning, a Bud Light truck comes rolling out of the alley behind Rice Hall. Hmmm … you should know that we practice at the crack of dawn, so why is a Bud Light truck making a delivery then? Is that how our administration gets through the work day? That would explain a lot of things.